Forever My Love (Berkeley-Faulkner #2)(80)

Mira smiled wistfully, opening her eyes and regarding Rosalie quizzically. “Do you really think marriage is the answer?” she asked. “I don’t. It will merely be a new role for me to work on, and I’m terrified that I’m going to fail at it… but there’s nothing else I can do.” Marriage was simply a ceremony… and although it was intended to join two people in an everlasting bond, she knew that no ritual, pronouncement, or ceremony on earth could dispel the sense of apartness she felt. Marriage would not change her, nor would it change the inner certainty that she would not fit into any one kind of life.

“I don’t understand your fixation with roles and parts,” Rosalie said, bewildered. “You’re not playing a part, you’re living your own life.”

“I’ve lived several lives so far, when all I wanted was just one.” She rubbed her forehead tiredly. “Oh, how old, how shopworn I am going to feel next to those girls of seventeen and eighteen. They know nothing of the world, but still they know what their placesare in it. They already know who they are and exactly what they are supposed to do. They’re so wonderfully conventional… I envy them.”

“I don’t think that you can define yourself by con-ventional standards.”

“But everyone else will judge me by convention standards. Don’t you see? This is all wrong—it’s wrong to try to pretend that I belong in your world, it’s; wrong for me to sneak in through a side door and take a place next to someone who has been born to all of this. Can’t we just find some kind of employment for me somewhere? Somewhere safe, somewhere quiet, where no one will notice.”

“You wouldn’t be any happier that way,” Rosalie said stubbornly. “And if what you say is true, and you really don’t belong anywhere, then you might as well fall in with my plans for you—you’re just as suited to marry a baron as you are to marry a baker.”

“Isn’t that a slight exaggeration?”

“You’re not a conventional person. You have your own rules and your own ways of thinking and feeling. You are far more beautiful than those girls you profess to envy, far more interesting and worthy of love than they are. You’re…” Rosalie sighed and looked at her helplessly. “You’re Mireille Germain… you’re many different things… you’re… a little bit of everything. And there’s no way to change that.”

Mira was silent for a long time, turning the words over and over until they made a peculiar kind of sense to her. With the innate practicality that had been bred in her through many generations of Frenchwomen, she began to see how useless it was to regret what she could never be. She was what she was, and as Rosalie had pointed out, there was nothing she could do to change it. Would it be so difficult to make the best of the situation? And was there really any other choice?

“So I am,” she said to Rosalie with a tired smile.Yes, I am Mireille Germain… and I suppose there are worse things to be, aren’t there?”

“So you’ve brought a summons from Juliana,” Alec said, looking up from his desk. Carr walked into Alec’s terrace rooms, straightening the jaunty knot of his cravat. The room in which Alec worked was simple and Spartan in design, decorated with the pleasant symmetry of an Egyptian motif. A wide mahogany desk was braced between two fretted windows. Alec had spent many hours working there, either on his architectural designs or the family bills, accounts, and interests both domestic and international. He had assumed such responsibilities ever since he had been eighteen and had grown accustomed to wielding complete control and power over the Falkner estates and properties.

“She’s your mother,” Carr said reasonably, daring to lean against the desk and fix Alec with an ingratiating smile. “She likes to see you every now and then… and especially after the last time you visited… what was it, three months ago?”

“Two months.”

“Whenever it was, she wasn’t pleased. She said you looked like a damned Frenchie, pale and thin—”

‘“Have you finally been reduced to carrying my mother’s messages back and forth for pocket money?” Alec growled. “Don’t you have anything better to—?”

“Come to think of it, you do look better. You’ve filled out again and your color’s good.”

“When I want a diagnosis, I’ll send for a physician.”

Alec knew that his appearance had been distinctly unhealthy the last time he had visited the Falkner estates. A few weeks of dissipation and unrestrained drinking tended to do that to a man. After the disturbing episode with Mira during the sleighing party, he had disappeared to London for a month, drinkingheavily in order to drown the thoughts and the insatiable longing for her from his mind. He had spent each night at Brooks’s, gambling with his cohorts until the early-morning hours, going to bed when daylight broke through the sky, rising in late afternoon. No matter how extreme his exhaustion was, he could never rid his sleep of the dreams he sought to escape. His face had become pale, his eyes glittery and unsmiling, his mouth harsh with discontent.

But as winter ended and spring began, he had taken a look at himself and been filled with self-disgust. He was no Byron, to moan and sigh over a woman who would not have him. He had never been given to prolonged fits of melancholy, nor the lazy dissipation of a dandy, and he had changed back into something approaching his old self. He had cut his drinking down to a small fraction of what it had been, and once again he had taken up frequent riding. He began to mix with a better crowd than the gamblers and dandies at Brooks’s. When he went to the club, it was usually for dinner, not betting. Now he was hard and fit again, and the outer difference was noticeable. If only it were possible to work such a change within himself as well as without. He could not lie to himself by pretending that any other woman could substitute for her.